We’re pushing it back, for the last time. You may feel inclined to go punch a kitten— or us… but please don’t…. As we get closer, the list of tasks gets smaller and the remaining tasks are easier to estimate, and so we’re getting a much clearer picture of where we are schedule-wise. Here’s what we’re seeing—

The hardware isn’t driving the schedule like we’d thought — software and firmware are determining the ship date. We have spent much the the last week shedding light on the remaining tasks and putting them into a revised schedule.

Here’s how it breaks down— we will reach code/feature completion the week of 1/27. We will then have a testing period, prepare the final release, which will push the ship date to the week of 2/17.

Pushing the ship date back is a big deal, we realize, but we want to give you the best information we have, even if it isn’t fun. And as much as we’d like to ship sooner, it would mean cutting corners and risking product quality. And that’s an even bigger no no.

So when we start shipping the week of 2/17, it will take 3 weeks to ship all of the rewards. Some backers, particularly those with the higher backer numbers, won’t receive their Pixys until well into March. We will lay out the shipping schedule (based on your backing number) closer to the ship date. And pre-orders (non-Kickstarter) will ship after all of the Kickstarter rewards ship, in the order received (of course). OK, that concludes the hard-truth portion of the update. (But I suspect the real pain will come at us in the comments!) Anyway, onto hardware—

Our contract manufacturer is cranking out Pixys full-tilt, and will continue to do so for several weeks. Here are some pictures they sent us yesterday.

Lots of Pixys awaiting testingFreshly baked!Functional testing

In that last picture, the functional test, the last I’d heard they’d tested 600 with zero defects— crazy! We will receive our first shipment of 2000 before the end of the year. We’ll do the final testing, programming, lens attachment and packaging here in beautiful Austin. Speaking of packaging, we’re having custom boxes printed up for our little guy, with color codes printed right on the box! You know, as part of the out-of-the box experience.

The custom pan/tilt mechanism design has been successfully prototyped and parts have been ordered. Check out the pictures below—

The mechanism will come as a kit. It’s easy to assemble, and it’s compact (as you can see in the pics.) It sits comfortably on a flat surface, but you can take the base off and replace it with your robot, or whatever else you want to mount it to, to give your creation the ability to look around and find/track even more objects. It’s mechanically fast— faster than the pan/tilt mechanism in the Kickstarter video. (BTW, you can still pre-order a pan/tilthere.)

The mounting brackets that attach Pixy to the pan/tilt mechansim will come with your Pixy and allow for fixed mounting options, if you didn’t opt for a pan/tilt.

So hardware is on track. Software is going well, but slower than we’d all like. When we changed the ship date the first time (this is the 2nd and final time) someone commented that it looks like we don’t know what we’re doing. They’re right! (well… sorta.) It’s our first Kickstarter, our first design with these parts, our first camera with these capabilities and this price point.

This process, while not going exactly as planned, has been awesome— it’s given us an opportunity to demonstrate our idea to you, and for you to tell us whether you like it, what you like in particular, what you don’t like, and what you’d like to see more of. It’s changed Pixy. We will ship something better than we originally envisioned. That’s on you. That’s your fault! (but thank you!!!)